Whether you almost fell off your chair laughing or recoiled in horror at the child’s statement, you might be one of the multitudes of parents who, consciously or not, subscribes to the broader principle that spending your dollars does, in fact, make your child holler with joy.

But a growing body of research paints a compelling picture that may help us rethink some of our over-the-top spending on children. These studies confirm some age-old wisdom about happiness: If the goal really is to make our children happy, perhaps what we ought to be doing is not over-indulging them, but giving them the opportunity to give.